> - SN is fairly humble.

You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.

Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.

There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.

A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

Sure he might not be humble, however if you read everything Satoshi wrote he came across as a very humble person.

Regarding his immense Bitcoin wealth, he has anonymised himself but not his Bitcoins. 99.9% of the Bitcoins he mined lay exactly where they were mined and he has made no attempt to move them or anonymise those coins. He might in the future but who knows.

In addition he made the first block unspendable so that the only block he had to mine himself to start the network would never contribute to his wealth.

It is possible that aspects of the SN persona were highly constructed but what is a simpler explanation - that everything about SN was fake or just his identity? It would have taken an enormous cognitive effort to be able to consistently demonstrate the same personality traits in post after post unless it came naturally. It seems like he was more concerned about technical discussion than hiding information about himself beyond his identity.

But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.

When I hear an argument about a simpler explanation, I tend to assume there's an appeal to Occam's razor; but I'm not sure that's useful here:

What's the chances that they took so much care to obscure their identity in every other way, but decided to use their genuine personality? Doesn't that seem improbable, too?

I accept the argument about it being hard to maintain two personas - but what is enormous cognitive effort for you and me might be basic operational security for someone else.

Bitcoin is very interesting, but I'd like if there was more caution about SN, given it has has potentially endowed them with vast resources.

I consider SN to be an entity with one or more people behind it.

I agree with you that there's no way DPR is Satoshi. DPR seemed to be learning to code when launching Silk Road. While Bitcoin had bugs (lots of them) to start with, it is not amateur level computer science. It's not even reasonable to assume that a dude who needed help getting curl to talk to a proxy would be competent enough to work with very advanced crypto concepts, and even invent a few things of their own (using standard crypto algorithms, but still, Bitcoin was not tested waters...).

So, yes, SN is smarter than DPR, and vastly more capable as a software engineer.

And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)

> And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)

Out of interest, aren't Satoshi's coins all held in a small number of wallets, so people will immediately see if anyone tries to use them? Presumably, this would provoke a crash in bitcoin prices.

From what I've heard, Satoshi's coins are spread around a lot of 50 btc wallets, and they're not so much known to be Satoshi's as suspected to be hers because there seems to have only been one person mining the blockchain at the start [1].

As other people started running the clients, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell Satoshi from any other miner.

So though Satoshi may never have spent the bitcoins mined when she was the only miner, she could still have mined and spent many coins once there were a few hundred other miners.

[1] http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fo...

Alright, I get that Satoshi might have spent those old coins before. But can he/she spend them now without everyone knowing about it?

The coins that are known to be Satoshi's (because they were mined when Satoshi was the only one mining) can't be spent without people knowing about it. But the coins that were probably mined later, where we don't know who mined them? Those can be spent easily.

It's pretty likely a fair number of coins belong to Satoshi, as mining must have been pretty easy in the days when people paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas.

she?

Since Satoshi's identity is unknown, it could be a female. Mike Hearn refers to Satoshi as a "he", and he would be most likely to know...but I don't know that Mike ever spoke to Satoshi in any form other than online, so he may not know Satoshi's preferred gender pronoun, either.

> Is it possible that DPR himself was an early adopter of BitCoins

It is also possible that DPR is more than one person.

This is extremely likely. The SilkRoad admins all have access to the old (and the new) DPR forum account. One of them was using it even after Ross was arrested, leading someone to ask why DPR was showing up on the active members list of the SR forum even after be was arrested.

Could that not have been the feds?

Libertas said it was SR admins. If it's a lie, I can't think of a good reason for it.

Fair enough. I wasn't familiar with the situation, that just would have been the conclusion I jumped to, and wondered why it wasn't yours.

Thanks for the info.

It seems likely there were at least 2 DPRs. Ulbricht hints at this in his interview: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-inte...

The link to Ulbricht's identity as DPR seems to go back to the beginning of the site. It seems more plausible he did that interview and made up the multiple DPR story to:

A: Advertise his willingness to sell out.

B: Perhaps toss a bit of confusion onto anyone following him.

C: In the Princess Bride the Dread Pirate Roberts chooses a successor which will use the same name.

The name certainly implies so.

SN makes mistakes. Most notably the bad build that required global cooperation from the miners to roll back.

That was due to an improper update the community made to the code, not the code that SN wrote himself.

Not just possible but likely. Then DPR created Silk Road to earn more BTC in a more traditional way than mining, and then DPR passed the business to one Ross Ulbricht. Or there may even have been more than one DPR before Ulbricht.